Monday, February 29, 2016

I don't watch the Oscars to get harangued about racism,
rape, sex abuse, greedy bankers, global warming and gay rights. I watch to be
entertained. If you want to preach at us, darlings, get into politics

In principle, Oscar night gives Hollywood a chance to
celebrate itself. It’s the time when the movie industry honors the significant achievements of its members. It’s a democratic process. Members of the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science vote for the nominees, in a primary
election, and then cast another vote for the winners.

What could be wrong with that?

Apparently, some people decided that the members of the Academy
had committed a thought crime: they did not vote for a sufficient number of
African-American nominees.

So Chris Rock got up to emcee the proceedings and spent a
goodly portion of his time chastising and guilt-tripping the assembled artists.
Thus, he was diminishing their achievements by making them feel that they had
earned their plaudits on the backs of excluded black artists. Effectively, Rock
ruined the celebratory atmosphere of the evening. One suspects that he will not
be invited back.

You might think that liberal Hollywood had it coming. Its
denizens have supported every crackpot left wing cause that there is. Thus, it
was hoist on its own petard, as Shakespeare might have put it. If anyone had had a sense of humor he would have been selling hair shirts at the door. It would have been the right fashion statement.

Hollywood moguls and actors and actresses allowed themselves
to be trashed on a very large stage by a stand-up comedian last night. And they
were obliged, by the laws of decorum, to laugh at his lame jokes.

Rock was wildly out of line. Besides, now, every time a
black artist is nominated for an Oscar everyone will be thinking that he did
not earn it but that he was given it to shut up people like Chris Rock.

As for the ratings, the broadcast achieved the lowest ratings
in eight years. They were down 6% over last year’s bad ratings.

Count it among the worst policy failures in recent history.
Count it with Obama’s handling of the civil war in Syria. Or as a corollary to
same.

At best, it ought to be cautionary. At worst, it probably
will not. Some people never learn.

I am thinking of Angela Merkel’s open arms policy toward
Muslim refugees, now understood to be a catastrophic
failure. Of course, Obama laid the groundwork in Syria, but it took Time
Magazine Person of the Year Merkel to prove the truth of the old adage: the
road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Formerly known as a pragmatic politician, Merkel saw the image of a suffering humanity and morphed into a humanitarian. Some even said that she was
acting like a Christian. She saw what was happening in the Middle
East and opened Germany’s borders to those who were fleeing war and famine and desolation.
She believed that it was her moral duty. She believed that it was Germany’s
moral duty. In effect, she found a way to damage her nation severely. We do not
yet know whether the damage is irrevocable.

In an excellent opinion piece for the German magazine Der
Spiegel Christiane Hoffmann takes us back to September 5, 2015—which is not
that long ago:

"The
world views Germany as a country of hope and opportunity," she had said
only a few days previously, as part of her annual summer press conference. She
also evoked the universal civil liberties that are part of the founding
principles of the European Union. It was the day when Angela Merkel decided to
follow her convictions, to replace pragmatism with idealism and to emphasize
the "Christian" in the name of her party, the Christian Democratic
Union. It was the first time in a long while that she didn't think things
through all the way to the end.

Merkel, a right-of-center politician, caved to humanitarian idealism.
She caved to sentiment. She felt badly for all of the refugees. She took on the
mantle of modern liberalism and chose to redistribute German wealth, to open
the doors of her country, to provide succor to those most in need. She yielded
to her maternal instincts. And she chose as her policy: the audacity of hope. Didn’t
the great Obama declare himself a citizen of the world in a stirring speech in
Germany?

What could go wrong?

It was a feel-good policy, a policy that would place Merkel and
her ilk on the moral high ground. It made them feel good about themselves.
After all, they were showing the proper amount of politically correct empathy.
As for the practical consequences, both for those it was intended to help, and
for those German citizens who would suffer the consequences of a calamitous mistake…
that did not enter their calculations. Normally a pragmatic politician Merkel
threw caution to the winds. She has reaped the whirlwind.

Merkel fell into the trap that eventually claims all
grandiose idealistic policies: she did not, as the article says, think things
through. Call it a lack of imagination. Call it a failure of policy analysis.
Call it an inability to see that however much humanity everyone had in common,
Muslims were, by their culture, different. They did not want to be citizens of
the world. They did not know how to be citizens of the world. Worse yet, they did
not have the cultural tools to adapt or to integrate into a free enterprise,
Western liberal democracy.

Merkel’s was a variant on a failed Bush administration
policy: bring democracy and freedom to the oppressed Muslims of Iraq and
Afghanistan and Gaza. Call it nation-building if you like, but it was really an
effort to impose a radically different culture on peoples who did not want it
and who could not absorb it. Those who were the objects of our largesse saw the
freedom agenda as a new crusade, a rejection and a discrediting of their
culture. They doubled down and fought back against it.

Hoffmann does not mention New Year’s Eve in Cologne. She
does not mention the attacks on German women or the crimes and the rapes in the
refugee centers… to say nothing of the rightist reaction within Merkel’s own
political party.

She emphasizes the conditions of refugees, many of whom have
not found a land of hope and opportunity. Anything but….

For her miscalculation, Merkel has been isolated by other
European leaders. She did not consult with them and they have not followed her lead. They have chosen not to
subject their nations to the misery that Merkel is visiting on Germany.

Other leaders have been closing their borders and building
walls. They are not their brothers’ keepers and do not consider the refugees
their brothers anyway. The European Union promise of open borders has been one
of the casualties of Merkel’s well-meaning, idealistic, humanitarian folly:

Border
controls have been reintroduced across large parts of Europe and fences are
being erected. It turns out that Merkel deceived herself about the extent of
European solidarity. There will be no harmonious distribution of refugees and
it is unlikely that Turkey will reliably protect Europe from a further influx
of refugees. That's a sad state of affairs. Indeed, nothing is as unseemly as
the gloating comments over Merkel's failure one hears these days in Bavaria and
Budapest. In Munich, Bavarian Governor Horst Seehofer has alleged that the chancellor's
Willkommenskultur for
refugees has radicalized the country, and, in Budapest, Hungarian Prime
Minister Viktor Orbán this week accused Merkel of "importing terrorism,
crime, anti-Semitism and homophobia" in an interview with
the German mass-circulation daily Bild.

The result:

In
recent days, thousands of refugees have once again been stranded along the
Balkan route, and this time they are being held back by border fences.
Desperate men, women and children can be seen camping out in central Athens.
And this time there are images that Merkel had hoped to avoid last September:
images of a Europe that is placing its bet on partition and deterrence. They
are images of defeat for the German chancellor. Merkel's humanitarian approach
in the refugee crisis has failed.

Hoffmann reports that Merkel is walking it all back… trying,
as it were, to put the toothpaste back in the tube. She is doing it slowly, but
she has recognized the error of her ways:

Conditions
for refugees are already rapidly deteriorating. Social benefits are being
reduced, limits are being placed on family reunification in a way that will
lead even more women and children to make the dangerous journey by boat to
Europe. The number of countries designated as safe will be increased, allowing
for the easier rejection and deportation of asylum applicants. And there will
be a forced repatriation of Afghan nationals -- to the very country that
Western troops were unable to pacify and is now sinking into civil war.

As of now, the flow of refugees is slowing down, but not
because of anything Merkel has done:

Currently,
significantly fewer refugees are arriving in Germany. This, however, is not the
product of Merkel's policies -- it is the result of her failure. Fewer people
are coming because Merkel's opponents have closed the borders along the Balkan
Route. Even back in the autumn when Hungary erected a border fence, the protest
from Berlin was at best cautious. And when Turkey began erecting a wall along
the Syrian border, officials expressed understanding behind the scenes.

Hoffmann concludes:

What we
are witnessing today no longer has anything to do with conviction -- it is the
return of the ultra-pragmatic Chancellor Merkel, who is paving an escape route
from her previous policies.

Sunday, February 28, 2016

Many people, myself included, are
convinced that the ascent of Donald Trump reflects the damage that Barack Obama
has done... to the culture, to our politics, to our standing in the world, to our
morale. Many people believe that Trump will restore American greatness, that he
will lead us to recover the greatness that Obama has frittered away over the
past seven years.

Let’s grant that Obama was clever
about it. He was cagey and subtle, not boisterous and bombastic. And yet, the
results were the same: declining morale and diminished self-confidence. America
is now a nation in decline, nation far less free than it was. Many Americans do not seem to know how it
happened and are willing to do what is necessary to restore America’s
greatness.

Some pundits thought that Obama
would be a Messiah, redeeming America’s sins, first among which was racism.
Many people today believe that Donald Trump is a new Messiah, saving America
from the horrors visited by the Obama administration.

This morning Ross Douthat offered
a cogent analysis of Trump within the current cultural context. He showed how
Obama has paved the way for Trump, or better how Trump is the perfect candidate for the age of Obama.

In his words:

President Obama didn’t give us Trump in any kind
of Machiavellian or deliberate fashion. But it isn’t an accident that this is
the way the Obama era ends — with a reality TV demagogue leading a populist,
nationalist revolt.

Douthat began by pointing out
that Trump is a Republican problem, a reaction to the repeated failures of
Republican leaders to stand up against Obama and to stop his agenda. Beyond
that, the Trump candidacy is also the antidote to the failed Bush presidency.

Douthat wrote:

The Trump uprising is first and foremost a
Republican and conservative problem: There would be no Trumpism if George W.
Bush’s presidency hadn’t cratered, no Trumpism if the party hadn’t alternated
between stoking and ignoring working-class grievances, no Trump as front-runner
if the party leadership and his rivals had committed fully to stopping him
before now.

Obviously, Trump comes to us from
reality TV. But, Douthat noted, Obama was the first candidate to base a
campaign on tropes from reality TV. After all, Obama had no qualifications to
speak of. Thus, his campaign was based on smoke and mirrors, the work of a
master illusionist:

First, the reality TV element in Trump’s
campaign is a kind of fun-house-mirror version of the celebrity-saturated Obama
effort in 2008. Presidential politics has long had an escalating celebrity
component, a cultish side that’s grown ever-more-conspicuous with time. But the
first Obama campaign raised the bar. The quasi-religious imagery and rhetoric,
the Great Man iconography and pillared sets, the Oprah endorsement and
Will.i.am music video and the Hollywood stars pledging allegiance — it was
presidential politics as one part Aaron Sorkin-scripted liturgy, one part
prestige movie’s Oscar campaign.

And also:

If
Obama proved that you can run a presidential campaign as an aspirational cult
of personality, in which a Sarah Silverman endorsement counts for as much as a
governor or congressman’s support, Trump is proving that you don’t need
Silverman to shout “the
Aristocrats!” and have people eat it up.

And, with his executive orders and his unwillingness to
enforce or implement the law, Obama has acted as an imperial and imperious
president.

In Douthat’s words:

… voters
are increasingly habituated to the idea of an ever more imperial presidency— which is also a trend that
Obama’s choices have accelerated. Having once campaigned against his
predecessor’s power grabs, the current president has expanded executive
authority along almost every dimension: launching wars without congressional
approval, claiming the power to assassinate American citizens, and using every
available end-around to make domestic policy without any support from Congress.

It ought to be obvious to everyone by now, but Trump is not
a conservative. His most fervent supporters are not conservatives either. Count
Chris Christie and Maine Governor Paul LePage, Northeastern liberal Republicans,
among his most prominent supporters.

But, Trump also appeals to disaffected Democrats, and surely
that is one of his strongest selling points:

These
voters had been drifting away from the Democratic Party since the 1970s, but
Obama has made moves that effectively slam the door on them: His energy
policies, his immigration gambits, his gun control push, his shift to offense
on same-sex marriage and abortion. It was possible to be a culturally
conservative skeptic of mass immigration in the Democratic Party of Bill
Clinton. Not so anymore.

Of course, it’s all speculation right now. Conventional
wisdom has concluded that Trump is the presumptive nominee and that he cannot
lose. It believes that Marco Rubio’s attacks are too little too late…
especially if, as now seems plausible, Trump crushes Rubio in Florida on March
15. It believes that Trump is coated with purest Teflon, and thus, that even
his refusal to denounce David Duke and the KKK—on the grounds that he knows
nothing about them-- will not hurt him.

Of course, if Trump defied all expectations in doing as well
as he has done, what will happen now that the expectations are reversed. Is he
like a stock that you should buy when no one wants it and sell when everyone
wants it?

But, even if the Republican establishment succeeds in stopping Trump-- which
seems less likely now that he is presenting himself as an establishment
Republican-- it would alienate so many of his voters that it would almost
guarantee the election of Hillary Clinton. Of course, if voters were really
concerned with sticking it to the Republican establishment they would be
flocking to Ted Cruz. When faced with the choice of Trump or Cruz,
establishment Republicans largely prefer Trump.

As for the higher truth, the late, great Yogi Berra said it
well: It ain’t over till it’s over.

Just in case you were wondering
how badly therapy has corrupted relationships, here’s a sterling example
from a column by Carolyn Hax.

A letter writer asked this
question:

Two people in my life recently wanted me to say
specific things to them to fulfill their emotional needs. It wasn’t a personal
preference, as in, “Please refer to my wedding as my Union” — a simple request
— but, “I want you to say sorry even though you don’t think you’ve done
anything wrong.” Or, “I want you to ask me about this because I want to talk
about it.”

I told both of these people I thought these
requests were ludicrous.

What aggravates me is that I don’t think they
got what they were looking for, which is asking me to feel emotions I don’t
feel, then to express these insincere emotions to their satisfaction.

Seriously, where does a person draw the line?
Maybe to just smooth the waters and make people feel better, you’re supposed to
say anything?

I suspect that the letter writer
is a woman and that she is referring to women friends. Given the media mania
over gender neuterdom, we are not told this vital information. I will say that
if this exchange happened in relationships between men the country is in a
lot worse shape than I thought.

At a time when women are
increasingly claiming a place in the worlds of business and the professions,
therapists ought not to be encouraging them to indulge this kind of whiny, wimpy,
sentimental psychodrama.

I note, in passing, that a coda
to Hax’s response, written by a man, identifies the letter writer as a female.
I suppose it’s possible that he is using the generic “she,” pronominal form
that does not exist, but let’s be optimistic.

For the record, I consider
Carolyn Hax one of the better advice columnists out there. Not quite at the
same level as Emily Yoffe who used to write as Dear Prudence for Slate.com, but
generally good nonetheless. I will mention in passing that the woman who has
replaced Yoffe on Slate is so obviously not up to the job that it’s
embarrassing to read her.

Anyway, Hax responds to this
letter writer by siding with the friends who want to tell her what to feel, how
to feel and how to express it even if she does not feel it. She charges the
letter writer for being unwilling or unable to fulfill the emotional needs of
her friends. As you can see, this quickly descends into a caricature of female
friendship… all sentimentality all the time. Perhaps only females get this.

In her response Hax neuters
everyone she can. Otherwise she would have to suggest that some women see
relationships as an emotional soup and feel offended when their friends do not
just jump in:

These people want something from you that you’re
obviously not giving, and I’m not talking about the stock, insincere phrasing
that you rightly question but too-combatively deride to their faces.

I’m
talking about the emotional satisfaction they would derive from knowing they’ve
been heard. If I read correctly between the lines here, you’ve knowingly denied
them the “I hear you” assurance they seek….

So, where
you see ludicrous requests, I see unfortunately phrased versions of “Please
understand me.”

Try that
next time, I suggest, in lieu of quibbling with their methods. Listen carefully
and make it clear you grasp how they feel, even when your experience puts you
entirely somewhere else.

As I said, Hax flings it straight into the soup of
sentimentality. She seems to believe that the letter writer is deficient in
empathy, God forbid, and thus should be feeling the feelings of her friends. She is offended by the letter writer's derision, but, to me that feels like an appropriate response to absurd demands.

I would humbly suggest that the friends are living their
relationships as scripted dramas and that they are feeding their friend her
lines. The friend balks, as she rightly should, because that’s no way to
conduct a relationship between two human beings. Her friends are trying to deny
her her freedom to choose how she wishes to relate to them. If the friends want
to play out dramas, they should go to acting school.

Note well in the letter writer’s exposition that both of her
friends want her to do what they want her to do because they want her to do it.
They have no real sense of their friend as another human but they believe that their desires should be
the rule.

The one wants her friend to apologize for something she did,
but that the friend, i.e. the letter writer, does not think was wrong.

Truth be told, I am not opposed to insincere apologies. But,
insincere apologies only have value when you have done something wrong but are
balking at apologizing. When you have wronged someone and have to choose
between an insincere apology and no apology at all, I would go with the former.

Yet, in the case at hand, the letter writer seems not to
have done anything wrong. Thus, she need not apologize. The person who should
apologize is her friend who is making this imperious demand, and who is
treating the letter writer like a character in a play who has forgotten her
lines.

As for the second friend, the one who says that she wants
the letter writer to ask her about something because she wants to talk about
it, let’s be serious.

If she wants to talk about it, she should talk about it. No
one is stopping her. If she believes that she cannot talk about it unless her
friend asks her to talk about it, then she has a serious problem. Can it really
be the case that she can only broach the topic when her friend asks about it?
Are we seeing a situation where the friend is going to say something insulting
about the letter writer and wants to be able to have plausible deniability,
thus to retain the right to shift the blame to the letter writer?

Anyway, this letter and the Hax response are dispiriting. I
find it sad that this is the way adult human beings conduct their
relationships. I strongly suspect that both of these friends have learned their
asocial and dysfunctional skills from therapy. And Hax herself seems to have been infected by the same therapy virus: she wants the letter writer to ignore the offensive nature of her friends' demands and to feel their pain.

The solution is clear: the letter writer should choose her
friends better. Anyone who goes into high dudgeon because you have failed to
recite your lines correctly is not your friend.

If you thought that the election campaign needed a little
comic relief, here’s the Daily Mail report of what happened right after Chris
Christie bravely stepped forward and endorsed the Donald:

Chris
Christie was left in no doubt who was boss on Saturday, when The Donald shooed
him off stage and packed him onto his private jet after a campaign stop,
telling him to 'Go home'. Just one day after taking a political risk by
dramatically endorsing the billionaire for the Republican nomination, Christie
found himself getting a figurative pat on the head and instructions to clock
out in front of 12,000 in Millington, Tennessee. While the theme music from
Harrison Ford's movie 'Air Force One' blared out over loudspeakers, Trump was
heard on a hot mic telling self-styled tough-guy Christie to 'Get in the plane
and go home. It's over there. Go home.' Pointing to his luxury private plane,
Trump's quick dismissal had the air of a man who had got exactly what he wanted
from his new political ally.

Chris Christie just learned what it means to be a chump. It was his special reward for shifting the news cycle away from the Donald's bad debate performance.

Saturday, February 27, 2016

If you haven’t read up on the history of psychoanalysis and,
in particular, Jacques Lacan, the most influential Freudian since Freud, you
will probably not find this story especially compelling. If you want to get up
to speed you should read my book The LastPsychoanalyst. Right away.

Obviously, the topics in my book and in the history of
psychoanalysis are somewhat difficult. And yet, if you do not know something
about intellectual history you will never really understand what is going on,
for example, in universities. It’s nice to observe the effects of political
correctness. If you don’t know the cause, you will be reduced to empty denunciations
but no counterarguments.

Anyway, today’s topic concerns a woman named Catherine
Millot. It was well enough known at the time, that she was Lacan’s last
mistress. From 1972 to 1981 she had an affair with the famed psychoanalyst. All
the while she was his patient.

In France, where people knew of the transgression, no one
really paid it very much attention. Lacan had understood that Freud was trying to
transform the culture, to substitute an ethic of desire for an ethic of duty
and work. Since, he believed that desire could only exist when people were
breaking the rules, his behavior was consistent with his theories… which, after
all, was exactly what it was supposed to be.

One might also refer to a somewhat earlier love affair
conducted by New York analyst Horace Frink with a patient named Angelika Bijur.
I recounted the story in my book and would make special note of the fact that
Frink’s analyst was Freud himself.

Besides, as I explained in some detail, Lacan placed himself
beyond morality. He might have begun by breaking the rules, but he aimed at a
condition of amorality, where the rules did not apply to him.

Naturally, psychoanalysts, especially the French variety,
are horrified at the notion that anyone would try to grasp the impenetrable
obscurities of the theory by referring to the man, himself. Good Platonists
that they are, they spend their time gazing directly at the pure Ideas. This
has rendered no small number of them blind to reality and morality.

In the first place, psychoanalysis is a practice, not a
theoretical parlor game. Second, to be perfectly truthful, the number of people
who really understand Lacan’s theories in the world today can be counted on two
hands... if that. Most people join the cult because they love the man himself. They can
toss around arcane formulae that they do not understand, but they do know that the meaning of the theories was the man himself. Ignore him and
you have missed the point completely.

Strictly speaking, psychoanalysis is not going to make
anyone get better. In France, in particular, it has never claimed to cure
anything, to treat anything or to relieve human suffering. Lacan himself said that the clinical practice of psychoanalysis was a scam and that if anyone ever got better in analysis it was a fortuitous accident. Even in the hands of
an Adam Phillips, it rejects normality as its goal.

If you were to ask what is its treatment goal, the answer
lies in the person of a man like Lacan.

Those who have read my book will understand this. Those who
have not, will not.

I recall a conversation I had with a friend in Paris in
1980. I noted to him that Lacan was looking seriously depressed. To that my friend,
who was also a personal friend of Lacan, replied, with an air of great empathy:
“His mistress just broke up with him. He has had his last woman.” Lacan was 79
at the time.

Anyway, Catherine Millot has just written a slim volume called
Life with Lacan about her love affair
with her psychoanalyst. In it she explains that she had consciously wanted to
be Lacan’s “last woman.”

The book was recently reviewed in Le Monde, the prestigious French newspaper, by Elisabeth Roudinesco, the quasi-official
biographer and historian of French psychoanalysis. I would mention that
Roudinesco is a notable apologist for Lacan.

I have translated most of the review for your interest, not
only to present some of Millot’s ideas, but also to show how the French cult
around psychoanalysis functions. I will note, in passing, that the translation
feels slightly awkward at times. In part this was because I did it in haste— blame
the blogosphere—but in part it is because Roudinesco’s French, to my eye, is clunky.
I have tried to smooth it out in places, but still….

Since Roudinesco is an excellent writer, I cannot imagine
why she would have written a review that feels slapped together and difficult
to read. I can only assume that she was trying to ensure that people do not read the book. If she had denounced it vigorously, in powerful prose, she
would have drawn people to read it. By dismissing it as old news she was
telling people that they should not waste their time.

One notes that within the cult of French psychoanalysis,
people read what they are told to read and do not read what they are told not
to read. If you think that American college students are having their minds
turned into Jello, as Camille Paglia says, you should take some time to look
into the intellectually stifling world of psychoanalysis. They make the
indoctrination mills called American universities look amateurish.

Anyway, Roudinesco:

Writer
and psychoanalyst, Catherine Millot offers a raw account of her love affair
with Jacques Lacan—the man who, incidentally was her analyst throughout her
affair-- from 1972 to 1981.

That is
to say, she accompanied Lacan through the last years of his life, from the
moment he gave his dizzying seminar on female mystics (entitled Encore) through the time when he became
mute and started fabricating Borromean knots, therein to seek the logical key
to madness.

Roudinesco notes that Millot’s portrait corresponds well to
what we already know about Lacan. It is consistent with the portrait I
presented in my book and the one that Roudinsco herself presented in several
volumes.

She is doing so in order to tell people that they need not
read Millot’s book:

Writing
about this man who she knew so well Millot paints a portrait that does not
contradict what we already know about him. Extravagant and libertine,
fascinated by the Catholic Church, trying to meet with the pope, in love with
Baroque Rome, armed with an American pistol to fight off attackers, Lacan
enjoyed the company of bishops and cardinals.

Importantly, as I remarked in my book, Lacan believed in
breaking rules. Having an affair with a patient certainly counts.

But Roudinesco recounts a conversation Lacan had with a
transsexual man in a patient presentation. She taxes Lacan with rudeness—
effectively, rudeness was Lacan’s signature—and explains how the presentation affected
Millot.

As a
psychoanalyst Lacan was certainly breaking the treatment rules, and during his
famous patient presentations at the Hospital of Sainte-Anne in Paris, he did
not hesitate to be rude to the patients.

[Millot
wrote:]

Thus,
speaking to a transsexual who insisted that he was a woman, Lacan kept telling
him, during the interview, that he was a man… whether he liked it or not, and
that no operation would make him a woman. In the end, Lacan called him: a poor
sod.

Astonished
by this scene, Catherine Millot became interested herself in transsexualism and
concluded that Lacan was speaking as he was in order to signify that the human
condition could adopt a miserable face.

Two notes here. Those who would like to read a transcript of
one of the case presentations can refer to the only one that has ever been
published. Lacan allowed me to put it in my book, Returning to Freud.

While it is true that Lacan practiced what Janet Malcolm
called “therapeutic rudeness,” he was sympathetic to the schizophrenic whose
interview I translated for my book. For the record, Malcolm introduced the
notion of Lacan's rudeness in a New York Times review of my book Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero.

As for Lacan as a lover, the picture Millot presents is
anything but flattering. Those who would like another unflattering portrait of the
psychoanalyst as a pathetic lover should read Philippe Sollers’ book Femmes or Women. Lacan is presented as a character called Fals. Curiously,
Sollers presents the notorious ladies’ man as weak and pathetic, not like a
dashing lothario.

This also suggests that Lacan had fully overcome shame. Being
a good pupil herself, Millot has shown that she has overcome her own sense of shame. She wrote an account of her love affair.

Roudinesco writes:

Unable
to separate from any woman, Lacan demanded of each of his mistresses complete
submission to unusual rituals: travel as a threesome, sharing the same
places, frequenting insufferable people (like Armand Petitjean, a
collaborationist writer.)

In
short, this strikingly and boundlessly baroque Lacan wanted to live his life
as he pleased. He considered that: “women always contained a scourge.”

For the record, collaborationist refers to those who
collaborated with the Nazis when France was occupied during World War II.

Roudinesco continues:

Nevertheless,
Catherine Millot always refused to participate in his manias. She loved Lacan
and he returned her love. She wanted to be “his last woman” fact that
elicited in her predecessor (madame T) a frightening jealousy. This latter
treated her like a rival and declared that she was “ descended from an ape.”
About which Millot wrote that “she easily recognized herself in the
description because she had long arms and a marked prognathism.

Catherine
Millot knew that her attachment resembled a mystical love:

I
had the feeling that I had grasped Lacan’s being from the inside. [I was}
convinced that he knew me completely and absolutely. A part of my being had
been given over to him; he had become its guardian.

She
understood that her lover, who was forty-three years older than her, was
declining before her eyes. Thus, when Lacan wanted to have a child with her,
she decided to end her treatment and her liaison:

For
me I felt that something had been torn away from me. For him it was an
earthquake.

Here we
have a life story cleverly written, in a Harlequin style, by a woman who now is
the same age Lacan was when she met him in Italy, in the heart of the “five
lands” (Cinque Terre) of the Ligurienne Coast.
Today the place has been declared by Unesco as a world historical site. A
tawny Lacan.

Psychoanalysts like to agonize over the question of the end
of analysis. Surely, the termination of Millot’s analysis, at a moment when a
79-year-old man told her he wanted to have a child with her… deserves to be
counted as an especially poignant example. It will surely elicit a great deal
of mindless theoretical lucubration from the Lacanians.

The last sentence is peculiar: Un Lacan couleur fauve. Make of it what you will.

Yesterday, however, Cohen wrote a strange column in which he
pretended to be writing a speech wherein Obama would defend his foreign policy.
Cohen, or Obama-Cohen called it a policy of restraint. We do better to call it Do-nothingism. It's principle is simple: if you do nothing, they presumably you cannot be held accountable for doing something.

We have in this blog examined many different explanations for Obama’s
foreign policy failures. Among them: incompetence, sympathy for America’s
enemies, believing that America is the problem, not the solution.

Put them together and you have a good picture of what went
wrong with Obama’s foreign policy.

In writing a speech for Obama, Cohen is suggesting that
there is method in the madness. I suspect that there never was a real rationale,
but that, in looking back, you can find a rationale for just about anything.
The truth is, if you cannot articulate a policy before you act then you do not have a policy.

Cohen opens with Obama contemplating the sting of public
criticism. People accuse him of refusing to defend America’s interests.
People believe that he does not accept America’s leadership role in the world. Since
there is no evidence to suggest otherwise,
the criticism does have some bite.

Obama-Cohen begins on the defensive:

To say
this is to be accused of defeatism, of managing American decline and of giving
up on American exceptionalism. That is why I have pursued an implicit foreign
policy rather than an explicit one. That is why I waited so long to give this
speech on my doctrine of restraint. No president wants to make a speech called
“The Consequences of the End of the American Century.” It’s political suicide.

So, Obama did not really have a policy. You need to know
something to formulate and implement a policy. Obama did not know much of
anything about world history or foreign policy, so he had to make it up as he
went along. By default, he allowed himself to be led around by his ideology and
his emotions.

Obama-Cohen does not seem to understand that, if the
American century is over, he himself has been its undertaker. Just like Obama
himself, Obama-Cohen never takes responsibility for anything.

Having weakened America, having shown himself to be weak,
Obama-Cohen suggests that American power is no longer as consequential as it
once was. Had he suggested that he was responsible for this decline, we would
have been more likely to agree:

The
consequence is that American power still counts but no longer clinches the
deal. Multilateral solutions to international problems must be pursued. The
Iran nuclear agreement — reached with help from Russia, China, Britain, France
and Germany — is one example. Another is the Paris Climate Agreement. Military
power can only be used as a last resort, for clear and achievable political
ends, and when there is a workable plan for post-military development. That was
not the case in Iraq. Look at the price.

If the best Obama-Cohen can do is to tout his disastrous
deal with Iran and an empty climate change agreement, he has accomplished
precisely nothing. The mass migration
of peoples from the Middle East and Africa risks changing Western civilization
for the worse… for decades, if not centuries to come.

Being an amateur Obama-Cohen tries to rationalize his
weakness and failures by setting up an alternative that is worse. It would be
like someone who is gun-shy defending his cowardice by saying that being
trigger-happy would be worse.

Obama-Cohen continues:

I know
that many people think my policies have failed in the Middle East, particularly
in Syria, and that President Putin has filled the vacuum. My priority was to
avoid overreach in the use of American power, adjust our ambitions to the
realities of the world and devote resources to neglected domestic priorities
including infrastructure, inequality and health care.

He continues to set up a false choice:

I’ll
take that moniker, if the alternative is to embrace feel-good posturing and
drift into another intractable war in which young Americans die for murky
causes in the indifferent sands of the Middle East.

Here, Obama-Cohen shows what is wrong. He believes that
there are only two alternatives: all-out war or nothing. Simple-mindedly he
sees the world in all or nothing terms. As long as he is not doing what he is
afraid to do—go to war—he thinks that he is doing the right thing. He has
failed to understand the diplomacy always seeks a middle ground between two
extremes. And he has failed to see that there are many ways to exercise
leadership. He was a tennis player trying to play in a chess tournament against
grandmasters.

Then Obama-Cohen starts listing some of his failures.

Should
I have backed the pro-democracy uprising of young Iranians in 2009 against the
regime, and might American support have tipped the balance? Should I have done
more to ensure the fragile Egyptian experiment in democracy did not fail by
pressing former President Mohamed Morsi to restrain his divisive Muslim
Brotherhood agenda? Should I have called the coup that ousted him a “coup”?

These are situations where Obama was frozen like a deer in
the headlights. He looked at the situation and did nothing. Nothing is not a
policy. It is not a policy of restraint. It is cowardice.

But, of course, his team agonized over the issues. They
might be a band of incompetents, but at least they have the right feelings. Don’t
you feel better already?

I know
members of my foreign policy team have agonized over Syria and its
quarter-million dead. One or two may have been close to resigning. The refugee
flow into Europe destabilizes allies. But I do not lose sleep. This job is
about tough choices. Restraint was the wiser option for a chastened America
unready to pass the mantle but condemned now to share it.

As I said, other options were available. Obama was
restrained because he did not know what he was doing. His restraint was an
orderly retreat. If Obama-Cohen did not understand it, the rest of the world
did.

Were you wondering why America is divided against itself? Were
you wondering why the national mood is so foul, why Americans are increasingly
at each others’ throats?

The answer is easy and difficult. It is easy to identify the
source: it is living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It is more difficult to
understand how the awful behavior of the president trickles down through the
population at large.

It’s not new that the Obama White House is petty, vindictive
and mean-spirited. Didn’t its treatment of Israeli Prime Minister show off
Obama’s ugly side… which at the same time giving a green light to anti-Semitism?.

Now, Obama has focused his wrath on New York City. He wants
to withhold funds that would be used to fight terrorism. The reason: Senator
Chuck Schumer had the audacity to oppose Obama’s Iran deal. Besides, Schumer is
Jewish and Jeremiah Wright’s protégé never had good relations with Jewish
supporters of Israel.

Mort Zuckerman makes the case against the Obama administration. Since Zuckerman has long been a severe critic of Obama, he is not late to
this game.

Writing in U. S. News and World Report, Zuckerman says:

How
dare the senior senator from New York, Charles Schumer, have a mind of his own?
How dare the presumed next Democratic leader in the U.S. Senate have the nerve
to speak up for the city against a stupid decision by Washington when he has
already offended the White House by voting against last year's Iran nuclear
deal? They are questioning his "credibility in talking about national
security issues," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said, which really
means it is payback time for Schumer for being the highest profile Democrat to
join Republicans in opposing the president's international agreement with Iran.
Credibility? His credibility undercut the president's.

The
extraordinary broadside of petty politics came just hours after Schumer joined
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton in a
triple protest at Washington's folly of reducing the protection against
terrorism's No. 1 target. The Homeland Security budget for New York City is
threatened to be cut in half, from $180 million to $90 million. That money will
surely – must! – be restored. This petty and mean-spirited behavior by the
Obama administration plays personal politics with the lives of New Yorkers and,
oh just incidentally, could be a blow to the national economy.

This
absurd news came with no warning, no consideration, no explanation to anyone
with the grave responsibility of protecting a major city. It seems unthinkable
that the city is being punished because the senator eloquently and bravely made
the case against Obama's treasured deal with Iran, but the unthinkable is about
the only explanation anyone can come up with for something so irrational as
exposing New York at a time when, at every level of terror intelligence,
officials are so concerned that homegrown radicals will stage a Paris-like
attack on our soil.

How dare anyone in Obama’s American think for himself?

As you know, American universities are awash in political
correctness. It’s almost as though the thought police are running the asylums.
Now, where might the students have gotten the message that such behavior is acceptable?
Why do they think that insolence and petulance are acceptable? Where did they
learn that they had a right to mount vendettas against professors who dispute
the dogmas of the Church of the Liberal Pieties?

Surely, they learned some of it from their radical professors. But, do you think it's a coincidence that this has occurred during the administration of Jeremiah Wright's protégé?

It is very difficult
to show exactly how a president’s bad behavior filters down the public at
large. When you elect a president you elevate him to the position of national
role model. You are telling everyone that they should emulate his behavior.
People cue off of his manners. If they are bad manners, his being the president
makes them good.

Obviously, Obama sets a very poor example. But he is an
especially slick operator. His behavior is all the more influential for
appearing to be the model of decorum and good manners. Chuck Schumer—as loyal a
Democrat as one could wish—has just seen its true face.

Thursday, February 25, 2016

A recent column by George Makari has caused a bit of a stir
in what remains of the psychoanalytic ecosphere. Makari is both a practicing
psychiatrist and a student of the history of psychiatry and he attempts to
explain how he conducts two kinds of practice.

That seems more like the hook than the substance of his
article, so I will leave it to the side.

His first point, a point I have often made, is well worth emphasizing. The history of psychiatry is littered by pseudo-scientific theories
that have served no useful clinical purpose. These have failed because they
were driven more by ideology than of scientific fact.

Among them is Freudian psychoanalysis:

Historians
have shown that psychiatry has long suffered from the adoption of
scientific-sounding theories and cures that turned out to be dogma. Perhaps the
clearest example of such “scientism” was psychiatry’s embrace, in the early
19th century, of Franz Joseph Gall’s phrenology, in which all mental attributes
and deficiencies were assigned to specific brain locales, evidence be damned.
During much of the 20th century, psychoanalysis proposed far more conclusive
answers than it could support, and today, the same could be said for some
incautious neurobiological researchers.

Ideology is driven by ideas. It cherry picks the facts that
support its positions and ignores or tries to explain away the rest. Frank
Cioffi once offered an anecdote supposedly about J. Edgar Hoover. When Hoover
ordered surveillance on someone who was suspected of being subversive, he would
admit of two results. Either the facts demonstrated that the man was a subversive
or, if they did not, the man was labelled a “cunning subversive.”

Makari sees the same
process at work when people write biographies, or hagiographies of
psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. He does not mention the notion of saintliness
or that these biographies fall well within the tradition of the lives of the
saints. We owe the introduction of saintliness to Jacques Lacan.

Makari writes:

Much
less extreme, everyday infiltrations of ideology can be discerned in the
portraits that psychiatrists have drawn of their field. Most of these accounts
have been self-serving affairs, in which the past was ravaged so as to justify
present clinical certitudes. Nearly every generation has featured a proud
practitioner who dismissed his predecessors and lifted the flag of victory,
only to have it snatched away some years later. Since 1800, the end of history
in psychiatry has come with the triumph of the asylum, followed by Romanic
medicine, brain anatomy, genetics, psychoanalysis and, most recently, drugs
like Prozac.

As I said, the notion that psychoanalysis is idea-driven,
not fact-driven ought to have been well established by now. Makari does not
mention that Lacan, for example, never considered psychoanalysis to be a
science and declared that anyone who promoted it as a therapy was scamming his
patients.

Naturally, Lacan’s followers were happy to repress Lacan’s
truth. But their master understood perfectly that Freud was proposing an
ideology and that its true destiny was to become a pseudo-religion. See my book,
The Last Psychoanalyst.

One can, just for fun, recall a statement by Nobel prize-winning
biologist Peter Medawar, from 1975:

…
psychoanalysts will continue to perpetrate the most ghastly blunders just so
long as they persevere in their impudent and intellectually disabling belief
that they enjoy “a privileged access to the truth.” The opinion is gaining
ground that doctrinaire psychoanalytic theory is the most stupendous confidence
trick of the twentieth century; and, to borrow an image I have used elsewhere,
a terminal practice as well—something akin to a dinosaur or a zeppelin in the
history of ideas: a vast structure with radically unsound design and with no
posterity.

Obviously, Medawar was looking at psychoanalysis as a
clinical practice. And yet, if it is not a clinical practice but a stealth way
to indoctrinate people in a radical leftist ideology, we are dealing with an
altogether different beast.

One understands that some people continue to insist that
psychoanalysis is perfectly consonant with the values practiced by liberal
democracy. As Lacan might have said, such people understand nothing of Freud.

Makari sees the influence of the radical left in antipsychiatry,
movement that apparently has infected the minds of historians of psychiatry.
For reasons that escape me Makari credits it to Michel Foucault.

True enough, in a
book called Madness and Civilization Foucault
declared that the cultural production of madness was driven by the ideological
needs of Western civilization, of capitalism and liberal democracy.

And yet, if one is going to talk about antipsychiatry one
ought to mention that the man who named it a was a British psychiatrist named
David Cooper, in conjunction with R. D. Laing and a number of other figures in
the psychiatric world.

I will mention in passing that I knew Foucault and
occasionally discussed these matters with him. I never heard him claiming any
great interest in antipsychiatry, except to the extent that his good friend
Gilles Deleuze was associated with Felix Guattari, director of a psychiatric
clinic called Clinique de la Borde.

The clinic offered every known psychiatric
treatment within a context that was called institutional psychotherapy. Deleuze
and Guattari collaborated on a book called the Anti-Oedipus that made a bit of a stir in the 1970s. The one thing
that the clinic and its two sister clinics did not offer was: psychoanalysis. (I will mention in passing that all of the directors of all the clinics were in analysis and in supervision with Lacan.)

During the 1970s, the founding father of antipsychiatry, David Cooper was at times in residence at
La Borde. True enough, Guattari made a lot of noise about the antipsychiatry, but he was shocked one day to hear a pharmaceutical representative tell him that
his clinic ordered as much psychiatric medication as the psychiatric hospitals.
One might add that when the clinic was founded in 1953, they had precious few
medications to offer. The result was very ugly, indeed. No serious psychiatrist
associated with the place doubted the value of the new medications when they
became available.

As it happened the antipsychiatry did exercise some
influence over the patients at La Borde, generally in persuading them not to
take their medication. One day the medical director and owner of the clinic,
Jean Oury announced, when one of his patients had committed suicide, that the
antipsychiatry had killed one of his patients. The true story is more complex than you would glean by reading a book by Foucault.

Those facts, to give you a context for Makari’s reflections
on the influence of Foucault and the antipsychiatry on the practice of
psychiatry in France.

Yet, Makari is quite correct to see that the field of
psychiatry continues to suffer from ideological blinders. He might have
mentioned that this is not an accident. Ideologues and culture warriors have very often used psychiatry and especially psychoanalysis to
advance a culture and political agenda.

In Makari’s words:

For the
past three decades, the reigning model among historians of my field has been
dubbed “antipsychiatric.” Following the work of Michel Foucault, the fashion
has been to argue that psychiatry emerged as a police arm of the modern state.
Mental doctors were self-deluded or malevolent, their treatments cunning, at
times barbaric, methods of control. Mental illness itself, they argued, was a
false construct used to control dissidents, rebels and outcasts.

As I said, only Lacan had the intelligence to dispense with
the notion that Freudian theory was a science. One might say, as I have
suggested, that he had to do it to save the theory from drowning in its lies.

Makari continues:

However,
this vein of research has been tarred by its own crude ideology. If scientism
can falsely turn ethical and political issues into matters of disease, and
grossly exaggerate what we know about the nature of mental illness, Foucault
and his acolytes are prone to an antithetical failing: radical social constructionism.
Madness, they would have us believe, whether it is schizophrenia,
post-traumatic stress disorder or anorexia, is not grounded in any biological
reality. Greedy commercial interests and a repressive society, they claim, have
falsely transformed human differences and personal choices into psychiatric
disorders.

In any event I cannot imagine where Makari got the idea that
Foucault’s followers were running antipsychiatry programs in psychiatric
clinics, but at least we can allow him his say:

To me,
Foucault and his followers seemed impossibly naïve, even complacent. Had they
ever encountered severe obsessive-compulsive disorder or suicidal depression?
Had they ever seen a manic patient take lithium and be restored? Psychiatrists
might be blinded by their commitments as insiders, but this academic view
seemed sustainable only by remaining on the outside looking in.

Perhaps Laing and Thomas Szasz were doing such things, but
at La Borde, which was as radical a place as there was, whose leaders believed
that the future of psychiatry lay in practices that were being developed in
China during the Cultural Revolution, no clinician voluntarily deprived a
patient of medication or any other form of psychiatric treatment. If anything,
the patients were overmedicated and overtreated.

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Happily for us all, Kevin Williamson has proposed a good
solution to the Gitmo problem:

But the
usual framing of the question — keep them in Gitmo or send them to some federal
Supermax — presents a false choice that ignores a seldom discussed option for
dealing with these prisoners.

I
refer, of course, to the relatively straightforward expedient of shooting them.

The
prisoners held at Gitmo are, for the most part, what is known under
international law as “francs-tireurs,” non-uniformed militiamen who conduct
sabotage and terrorism operations against occupation forces. Under Article 4 of
the Geneva Conventions, fighters eligible for the protections extended to
prisoners of war are obliged to meet several criteria, including the wearing of
uniforms or fixed insignia and — here’s the rub for the Islamic State et al. —
conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
Non-uniformed militiamen and insurgents sawing the heads off of Wall Street
Journal reporters do not qualify for Geneva Convention protections. They are,
under the applicable international law, subject to summary execution, as are
captured spies, terrorists, and the like.